The US Inland Revenue Service (IRS) is turning to AI agents for backup. With its workforce down by a quarter this year, the tax agency is rolling out Salesforce’s Agentforce platform across several divisions as it tries to keep services running with fewer people.
The IRS will use Agentforce across the Office of Chief Counsel, Taxpayer Advocate Services and the Office of Appeals, Paul Tatum, Executive Vice President of Global Public Sector Solutions at Salesforce, told Axios.
The move follows major staffing cuts at the agency implemented by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has since been quietly disbanded according to reports, as well as furloughs during the recent government shutdown. The IRS lost around 25 percent of its staff between January and May, shrinking from roughly 103,000 employees to about 77,000, according to a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).
The US Congress has reduced the IRS’s funding under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) from $80BN over a 10-year period to $37.6BN. And proposed budgets for the 2026 financial year would reduce the agency’s annual funding by around 20 percent.
“Completing IT modernization projects, providing quality service to taxpayers, and enforcing tax laws with a reduced workforce and budget will be challenging for the IRS,” the TIGTA said.
That’s where Salesforce comes in. The vendor received FedRAMP High Authorization back in June for Agentforce alongside its Data Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Tableau Next offerings. It launched its Agentforce for Public Sector edition in August, which provides government agencies and local authorities with tailored, pre-built and AI agents.
Salesforce has already been working with the IRS to modernize some basic technology in those departments and will now add AI agents to handle tasks like generating case summaries and searching data to reduce the time it takes to handle customer interactions.
The aim is to help employees process cases so that taxpayers get the information they need faster, rather than to replace them, Tatum said.
The TIGTA pointed out that the agency still needs human staff to manage its complex remit:
“Despite numerous ongoing automation projects, the IRS still needs skilled and experienced employees to interpret tax law changes, investigate criminal activity, prevent fraudulent refunds, and implement complex coding changes for its information systems.”
That puts pressure on employees to deliver all this while providing a satisfactory service to taxpayers.
According to a separate TIGTA report in October, the Inspector General received nearly 250 complaints from taxpayers during the 2024 filing season, from January through May 2024, about interactions they had with IRS representatives.
The TIGTA found that IRS contact center representatives were typically courteous and professional in their interactions with taxpayers. But it identified “some instances where improvements are needed”. In 11 percent of call recordings, taxpayers received poor customer service, such as unprofessional behavior from IRS representatives, long wait times on hold or disruptive background noise. Another 15 percent of calls were either dropped or disconnected.
Why Automated Platforms Are Emerging as a Fix for Government Contact Center Shortages
AI platforms like Agentforce could provide a solution for government organizations like tax agencies that are facing a challenge in staffing contact centers to provide service to millions of taxpayers, especially during peak seasons.
Efforts to boost contact center productivity eventually hit a natural limit, because employers face a challenge in maintaining full staffing. “There’s a ceiling. You can't make people give 110%. We work with governmental organizations who are losing employees and haven't got the power or the money to fire into that space,” James Mackay, Regional Sales Manager at conversational AI firm Rasa, told CX Today in a recent interview.